Iraq after Isis: After decades of war – including the last battle against Isis – Iraq is in danger of losing the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates. In the first part of a new series, Patrick Cockburn reports that as Turkey, Syria and Iran dam its rivers, parts of the country are turning into desert…

National outrage over President Trump’s policy of separating immigrant children from their parents as a way to deter illegal immigration into the United States has forced the president to abandon the policy. The outrage came from all sides of the political spectrum, especially from the left, and from the mainstream media.

Trump’s policy is obviously cruel and brutal, given that it uses children as pawns to achieve a political end. No matter how much psychological damage is inflicted on children owing to the fear that comes with forced separation, the idea is that such emotional damage is worth it given the aim of preventing or discouraging illegal immigration to the United States.

What’s strange, however, is that while there has been mass outrage over Trump’s separation policy, there is virtually no outrage over the U.S. government’s policy of killing children as a way to achieve the political goal of regime change in foreign countries. Read the rest of this entry »

Suffice it to say that this middling soldier gave his youth, and innocence, to what we used to call the Global War on Terror (GWOT).

I left several of my boys in the meaningless streets and fields of Iraq and Afghanistan: five killed by improvised bombs, a couple still in wheelchairs, one with a triple amputation; dozens more were shot and wounded; perhaps hundreds emotionally and morally damaged for life. Two of my troopers got themselves killed over there and didn’t even know it: a suicide and a prescription overdose…so it goes for my generation of volunteer “warriors.” Read the rest of this entry »

What we do know is that America’s ill-advised and unnecessary invasion handed a big win to Tehran, and, for the last 15 years, Iraq was ruled by generally Iran-friendly Shia chauvinists. It may now be indirectly governed by a populist ideologue—Sadr—who openly championed the death and maiming of America’s cherished soldiers.

Iraq may be Iran-friendly Shia but Iraq and Iran friendly never attacked US. Sunni friendly Saudi Arabia, that is another story.

…We all knew who was behind that 2007 attack, of course: The Mahdi Army, the anti-American militia of the populist cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.

The whole mosque-raid and IED-strike episode reflected in microcosm the law of unintended consequences. In fact, the latest polling results from Iraq tells the same, broader story. Sadr, the despicable strongman of the slums, looks to have won the first general election in Iraq since the defeat of ISIS.

Sadr’s militias twice rose up against U.S. forces in Iraq and were responsible for hundreds, if not a couple thousand, American combat deaths. Sadr came from an impeccable pedigree of Shia scholars and leaders— Saddam had killed his father, brothers, and uncle—but Sadr, though always popular among the dispossessed, was then seen as little more than a joke. Many urbane Shia referred to him as “Mullah Atari,” a reference both to his lack of scholarly theological credentials and childhood penchant for video games. American troops mostly called him “Mookie” and hated his guts.

Sadr has since re-branded himself as an enemy of corruption and a cross-sectarian proponent of governance reform. Nonetheless, to my men and most U.S. troopers, he’ll always be the fiercely anti-American thug who sent his impoverished, hopeless fighters out into the streets to kill soldiers and marines…

The U.S. Army can bring down a dictator, but no amount of power and might can realistically control and construct the proceeding governments. The result: Moqtada al-Sadr astride the Iraqi nation-state. The government that the U.S. military installed so long ago grew so weak, so corrupt, and so illegitimate that its people chose a daft warlord to right the ship.

Let us remember this lesson and preemptively oppose the next regime change operation (potentially in Iran?). After spending $2.2 trillion in Iraq, and losing thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives, we are not safer than we were before. Furthermore, the hard-earned taxpayer dollars could have instead been reinvested in here at home, benefiting the American people…

What we do know is that America’s ill-advised and unnecessary invasion handed a big win to Tehran, and, for the last 15 years, Iraq was ruled by generally Iran-friendly Shia chauvinists. It may now be indirectly governed by a populist ideologue—Sadr—who openly championed the death and maiming of America’s cherished soldiers.

Still, two things are certain. First, the U.S. has gained nothing of strategic value from its decades-long experiment in imposed regime change. And second, more tragically, I’ll never be able to explain this latest turn of events to Fuller’s widow—or to tell her what this was all for.

Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona admitted Friday that the Iraq War was a mistake.

“The principal reason for invading Iraq, that Saddam had WMD, was wrong,” McCain wrote in his new book. “The war, with its cost in lives and treasure and security, can’t be judged as anything other than a mistake, a very serious one, and I have to accept my share of the blame for it.” Read the rest of this entry »

As Americans continue to rage over the Valentine’s Day school shooting in Florida, expressing indignation at both the atrocity and efforts to impose (or reject) gun control, the U.S. government has acknowledged its own perpetual addiction to violence.

According to two letters released by the federal government last week in response to an inquiry from Virginia Senator Tim Kaine, the U.S. plans to maintain its military presence in Syria and Iraq indefinitely, citing vague threats of terrorism.

In one letter, Deputy Under Secretary of Defense (Policy) David Trachtenberg responded to Kaine by justifying continued operations in Syria with the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), passed by Congress in the wake of 9/11 to justify invading Afghanistan. Read the rest of this entry »

Even the U.S. media has been reluctantly reporting that ISIS has been rolled back in Syria by the joint efforts of the Syrian Army and the Russian air force with the United States and its allies playing very much secondary roles in the conflict. The Russians have, in fact, complained that Washington seemed just a tad disinterested in actually cooperating to destroy the last remnants of ISIS in the few areas that the group still controls, citing most recently an alleged incident during the Syrian government liberation of the town of Abu Kamal in which U.S. air assets on site appear to have allowed ISIS fighters to escape. Read the rest of this entry »